Wednesday, October 31, 2012

It
is worth recollecting the array of attacks from the Obama camp that failed to
carry the day. Romney’s approval rating
is now higher than Obama’s and the Obama team tried portraying Romney as:
1) the “vulture” capitalist; 2) a tax evader and/or a felon for signing (or not
signing) Bain documents after he left to run the Olympics; 3) killer of Joe
Soptic’s wife; 4) outsourcer of jobs to China; 5) determined to take
contraception away from women; 6) ready to give a tax cut to the rich and hike
middle-class taxes; 7) egging on the auto industry’s demise; 8) willing to
throw granny over the cliff on Medicare; 9) President George W. Bush’s
political twin; and 10) Big Bird terminator.

As Obama explained in 2008, when you
don’t have a record to run on, you have
to paint your opponent as something to run from.

A sign of Desperation

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka is
blaming the EPA’s war on coal on Mitt Romney.It appears the coal miners are making a difference in Ohio and
Pennsylvania.

CBS is out
with a new poll of the critical swing states Ohio, Florida, and Virginia. In
each, Romney posts significant leads
among Independent voters. In
Virginia, Romney leads Obama by a massive 21 points among Independents. In OH
and FL, he leads by 5-6 points. If this lead holds through election day, he
will not lose these states, based on past elections.

Romney also
has big leads among those most likely to vote. He wins seniors, the most
dependable voting demographic, by 13 points in VA, 11 points in FL and 9 points
in OH. Again, if these trends hold, Romney will sweep all three states,
according to CBS.

Of course, since this poll was commissioned by CBS,
they are downplaying these results.

Miscalculations of the American Left

The American left, the Obama
campaign team, the Democratic establishment, and much of the mainstream media are stunned and surprisedby the depth
of reaction to the exposure of a vapid Barack Obama during the three
presidential debates. Revealed to the world was a man who could not live
up to the well-crafted image of one of the most adept, well-liked, and
intelligent politicians in American history. Once deflated, this image could never be rebuilt. Obama's performance was indicative of an unprepared
and unqualified president unable to defend his four years in office or present
a cogent plan for the next four.

Further, the Euro-socialist policies eagerly pursued by the Obama
administration and the Democrats in Congress, which in the hallowed halls of academia
and liberal think-tanks always succeed, not
only have failed miserably to rescue the economy, but are being soundly
rejected by the majority of the populace. They, unlike the insulated
elites, are experiencing the real-life consequences of these actions, in a
global and domestic landscape of turmoil, indecision, and uncertainty.

Early voting:What does it mean?

It hasn't gotten too much attention outside of talk radio, but if accurate, Gallup's study of early
voters neutralizes one of the Obama campaign's best road-to-victory talking points.
As it conducted tracking polls (which have been paused for now), Gallup asked
voters whether they'd cast ballots or intended to before election day. The early voters broke 52-46 for Mitt Romney. The dawdling voters who would vote before election day were tied,
49-49. The voters waiting for November 6 broke for Romney, again, by a 6-point
margin.

This would be easy to explain away if Obama had lagged in 2008's early
vote. After all, this study includes votes in Georgia and Texas and other
places that have broken away from Obama. But . . . in 2008, Obama was winning this vote. An identical Gallup study
taken around the same time gave Obama a
53-43 lead with early voters and a 50-44 lead on voters who would wait for
election day.

Remember, "If votes cast on Election Day decided the 2008
election, McCain would have won in Florida, Colorado, North Carolina and
Iowa." That's how central the early vote is to Obama's strategy.

In
November 1984, TWC’s board demanded that non-white students should have the right to bar whites from their meetings on campus.
They also demanded minorities-only meetings with the deans. The ban was frankly
unnecessary, since whites were made to feel unwelcome at the meetings if they
were invited at all, but the TWC continued to press for it, arguing, too, that blacks ought to be able to bar whites from
attending events aimed at discussion of “sensitive” racial issues.

Quarter of a Billion Grant creates
408 new jobs

Battery maker A123 Systems vowed thousands of new jobswhen it received a nearly
quarter-billion-dollar stimulus grant in late 2009, but federal job-tracking
figures show only a few hundred positions were created before the company joined a growing list of federally backed
energy businesses that ended in bankruptcy.

How Mitt Romney will boost the
economy

Second, current economic
policy is the reason the economy is in such bad shape. Unfortunately economic policy has consisted mainly of a series of short-term interventions—the stimulus packages, cash for
clunkers, temporary payments to state governments and individuals—that have not
led to a strong sustainable recovery. At
best they produced small short-term economic blips which did not last. Basic
economics tells us that such temporary policies do little to stimulate
spending. You need more lasting reforms as shown in the recent book Government
Policies and the Delayed Economic Recovery
(Hoover Institution Press) edited by Lee
Ohanian, Ian Wright, and me….

…Here
too the defenders of the policies counter with a rosier view. Some say that the fiscal stimulus packages
stopped the economic free fall. But this is not what the data show: The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act
passed in February 2009, while retail sales, exports and new investment orders
ended their sharp free fall in December 2008 or January 2009. The view that
the stimulus worked mainly comes from economists who predicted that the
stimulus would work before it was passed, and they simply used the same models
over again to claim it worked.

ADP has slashed their Employment
Number for September

ADP originally said the economy
created 162,000 jobs in September.They have now revised that number down to 88,200.Economists expect the
October numbers that will be released on Friday to come in at 125,000 jobs with
the unemployment rate holding steady.The one thing you can count on is that that
prediction is wrong.

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

When you consider
the fact that the CorruptMedia's been talking for weeks about how Obama's crushing Romney in early voting,
you would think Gallup proving that Narrative a big fat phony lie would be
news. Instead, though, they bury this
explosive news at the bottom of a piece headlined: “In U.S. 15% of Registered
Voters Have Already Cast Ballots.” Sounds like a nothing story, right?

Except waaaaay at
the bottom we learn this:

Thus far, early voters do not seem to be swaying the
election toward either candidate.

Romney currently leads Obama 52% to 45%
among voters who say they have already cast their ballots. However, that is comparable to Romney's 51%
to 46% lead among all likely voters in Gallup's Oct. 22-28 tracking polling.

The Romney campaign is pinning its
hopes on Ohio's independent voters. "The last five major
statewide races in Ohio, the candidate who won independents won the race,"
Jennings explained. "Rob Portman, John Kasich, Sherrod Brown, Ted
Strickland, Barack Obama -- they all have one thing in common. They won
independents."

Pollster Rasmussen agrees. "I expect the partisan breakdown in Ohio to be fairly even,
roughly the same number of Republicans as Democrats," he said in an
email exchange. "If that's the case, whoever wins Independent voters wins
the election."

Comparing Benghazi and Plame
gate we find when it comes to politicizing it we need to look at the last item on the list, the number of
times the scandal was on page one of the NY Times.Plamegate leads in that regard 90 to 0.

The Benghazi Story
Refuses to Die, And It’s Hurting the President

We still
don’t know exactly what happened between the Pentagon, the State Department,
the CIA and the White House as Americans in Libya requested support for
Ambassador Stevens and his team in their final hours, and we almost certainly won’t before the election.

But that
doesn’t do the administration much good. As various departments and officials leak to save their careers and
retaliate against rivals, grenades keep getting lobbed and emails and memos
keep getting leaked. The result is that theattack in Benghazi isn’t fading out of the news. As the last undecided
voters make up their minds, the media outlets following this story with the
greatest attention keep getting enough ammunition to keep the story alive and
force the rest of the media to acknowledge the story, and that doesn’t help a
White House simultaneously wrestling with a close election and a massive mutant
storm hurtling at the East Coast.

Benghazi:An October surprise or simply news?

This isn’t an “October surprise” foisted on the media by
opposition research; it’s news.

This story raises precisely the sort of “big issues” the
media routinely claim elections should be about. For instance, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said last
week that the “basic principle is that you don’t deploy forces into harm’s way
without knowing what’s going on, without having some real-time information
about what’s taking place.” If real-time video of the attack and
communications with Americans on the ground begging for assistance doesn’t
constitute “real-time information,” what does?

This is not to say that Fox News is alone in covering the
story. But it is alone in treating it like it’s a big deal.

Panetta’s remarks
remind me of the quotation, “A ship is safe in harbor, but that's not what ships are for.”The US Military is ready to aid Americans in distress
whenever, and wherever.

Two Americas

John Edwards was correct, there aretwo Americas.One is represented by Lena
Dunham and the other is represented by Tyrone Woods.Which America are you part of?

Are we going to see an undertow
election?

Romney's operational prowess is
second to none, and getting out the vote isn't a question of strategy but
operation. Even given that the state
Republican parties are shouldering much of this effort, and even given all
the advantages Team Obama was likely to have in that arena, if Team Romney
could end up close to matching them in this respect, we could be looking at an undertow election like none we've seen before. This would reflect not so
much a groundswell as a cave-in, one where independents did not shift to Romney
but away from Obama, where the bottom truly drops out of the Obama effort, and
the story the left focuses on for the next year is why in the world those people
stayed home.

If this happens, it won't be a late night after all.

Obama’s Campaign Death Rattle

As a veteran of numerous
national, state and local campaigns, I can tell you that each race and each
campaign has its own life cycle. The 2012 presidential contest is no exception.
As polls tighten, and especially since Mitt Romney’s decisive performance in
the first debate, Team Obama and the president himself are showing signs of what I term a campaign’s “death rattle.”

GOP contender Rick Santorum
withdrew from this year’s Republican primary within three days of my
declaration that his campaign was in the final stages of “death rattle.” The phenomenon has three distinct stages.

In Stage One Death Rattle, the candidate veers sharply off-message,
seemingly desperate to change the subject.

Osama’s dead and GM’s alive—Or is
he?

I guess its okay to ask if Osama bin Laden is actually dead since
he’s listed as a contributor to Obama’s campaign.Now there’s someone who doesn’t hold a
grudge.And the Obama campaign took the
donation, twice actually.

Abortion—the other side of the story

"Hearing the words from Richard Mourdock, I was actually
relieved."

So says Monica Kelsey, a woman conceived in rape, speaking in a web video
put out by the Indiana Right to Life PAC. The video is responding to a
Democratic Senatatorial Campaign Committee advertisement for Joe Donnelly, who
is running against Richard Mourdock in Indiana's U.S. Senate race. The race experienced a new twist after
Mourdock suggested a child conceived in rape was still a gift from God.

One of the more melancholy moments of the presidential
campaign occurred for me in a screening room. The film was Rory Kennedy’s
documentary about her mother, Ethel — the widow of Robert F. Kennedy. Much of
it consisted of Kennedy-family home movies, but also film of RFK in Appalachia
and in Mississippi among the pitifully emaciated poor. Kennedy brimmed with shock and indignation, with sorrow and sympathy,
and was determined — you could see it on
his face — to do something about it. I’ve never seen that look on Barack Obama’s face.

Instead, I see a
failure to embrace all sorts of people, even members of Congress and the
business community. I see diffidence, a reluctance to close. I see a
president for whom Afghanistan is not just a war but a metaphor for his
approach to politics: He approved a surge but also an exit date. Heads I win,
tails you lose.

Does Envy Explain Liberal
Thinking?

For some, especially those who are well-educated and
well-spoken, a sort of irrational furor
at “the system” governs their political make-up.Why don’t degrees and vocabulary always translate into big money?
Why does sophisticated pontification at Starbucks earn less than mindlessly
doing accounting behind a desk? We saw this tension with Michelle Obama who,
prior to 2009, did not quite have enough capital to get to Aspen or Costa del
Sol, and thereby, despite the huge power-couple salaries, Chicago mansion, and
career titles, felt that others had far too much more than the Obamas. “Never been proud,” “downright mean
country,” “raise the bar,” etc., followed, as expressions of yuppie angst.
The more one gets, the more one believes he should get even more, and the
angrier he gets that another — less charismatic, less well-read, less
well-spoken — always seems to get more.

So do not discount the envy of the sophisticated elite. The
unread coal plant manager, the crass car dealer, or the clueless mind who farms
1000 acres of almonds should not make more than the sociology professor, the
kindergarten teacher, the writer, the artist, or the foundation officer. What
sort of system would allow the dense and easily fooled to become better
compensated (and all for what — for superfluous jet skis and snowmobiles?) than
the anguished musician or tortured-soul artist, who gives so much to us and
receives so much less in return? What a
sick country — when someone who brings chain saws into the Sierra would make
more than a UC Berkeley professor who would stop them.